


do i respect you

by crowry



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Pre - Goblet of Fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-27
Updated: 2011-07-27
Packaged: 2017-11-29 08:27:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/684894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowry/pseuds/crowry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not all sharing is charity, and there is no shame in living like thieves. Remus Lupin learns to accept help instead of giving it, and Sirius Black does what he can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	do i respect you

**Author's Note:**

> Co-written in 2011 with Meg.

Sirius had been lying face down on the bed for the better part of three hours, trying and failing to get some sleep. His thoughts chased each other around, first _I let that fucking rat go_ and _It's my fault_ and occasionally, simply, _Harry_. He missed James and Lily, and he missed Harry. He felt he had let Harry down tremendously. And though he had seen him just that morning, he missed _Remus_.  
  
He startled as he heard the metallic grind of a key in the lock, and was just rubbing his face blearily when Remus entered the small house. Remus looked about as bad as Sirius felt.  
  
"They're all mad for turning you away," Sirius told him; he didn't need to ask about how the interviews had gone. Remus didn't answer, just grimaced and set his briefcase down on top of the icebox. He shrugged his robes off and hung them from a battered metal hanger on the back of the door, which he locked as soon as he was done with this, and dropped the key into the pocket of the robes.  
  
"I'm s--" he started to say, but Sirius cut across him.  
  
"Moony, shut up," he said, with as much authority as he could muster. (It was a fair amount, considering that Sirius still looked somewhat like a Muggle Halloween decoration.) "I'm not lying to make you feel better when I say it's brilliant here."  
  
Remus looked uncomfortable at this, as though he wanted to ask why, then, was Sirius lying? But despite the state of the house, which was very, very tiny and just as grubby, Sirius was not lying at all. The small kitchen table was pushed up against the foot of the small, quilt-covered four-poster, which dipped severely in the center and was missing large chunks of one of the headboard. Everything was caked in a film of dust that appeared to be well on its way to becoming a sedimentary layer. It was, Remus had pointed out several times in embarrassment, all he could afford on his savings. This was part of the reason Sirius found it so wonderful.  
  
There were things Sirius did not like about the house, but none of them had anything to do with its size or cleanliness. The scratches in the sideboards and floorboards, Remus's habit of locking himself in, and the stifling thickness of the hundreds of layers of wards Remus had put on the place, wards he checked more and more obsessively as the moon waned. These were the things that glared down at Sirius on the days he was trapped here, reminding him that it was his mistakes, his failures of judgment and lack of foresight and general _blindness_ that killed the Potters, lost Harry his family, and left Remus alone for all these years.  
  
He was brought out of his thoughts again by the creak of the kitchen chair as Remus lowered himself into it.  
  
"I'll go look again tomorrow," Remus said, and he looked distracted enough to have not realized he'd said it aloud. Sirius reached out with one, very thin foot and nudged at Remus's knee under the table. Remus looked up at him inquisitively.  
  
"I'm hungry," he said, and wanted to mash his head on the table when he saw the look of fear on Remus's face--like he might not have enough food, or any food for Sirius, and wanted to apologize in advance, just in case.  
  
*  
  
Good fortune came in the form of a letter from Harry the following day. Hedwig arrived mid morning, the small roll of parchment tied to her leg, and settled on the windowsill to watch Sirius read it.  
  
"Dear Sirius," it said, "Being back at the Dursley's is awful. My cousin is on a diet and everyone here is in a worse mood than they usually are. Ron's family is going to have me over soon, and I can't wait. Say hi to Buckbeak for me. Hope you're doing okay, Harry."  
  
After rereading it several times, Sirius placed it in the square of space on top of the icebox that Remus's battered briefcase usually occupied. He crossed the room back to the window, and sat down in the chair.  
  
"Hello, owl," he said, and Hedwig clicked her beak at him. "Can you do me a favor?" he asked. She blinked at him.  
  
He pulled open the drawer of the kitchen counter and took out a piece of parchment. He had to push aside several Muggle pens before he found a small bottle of ink and a very worn-looking quill.  
  
Hedwig flew off as he was finishing the first draft of his letter, the wording of which he was considering very carefully, as it was to the Gringott's goblins. She returned later with a dead mouse, which she ate noisily at the window right next to Sirius. It didn't bother him. When he finished the letter to Gringotts, he sealed it with wax from the only candle he could find in the house, and pressed his thumb to it. It would have to do, he thought. Hedwig hooted irritably before accepting the letter. Sirius hoped the goblins wouldn't turn him in. As much as his reward was worth, the Black family vaults held considerably more.  
  
*  
  
Remus was a truly exceptional wizard, but no man, Muggle or magic, could make something out of nothing. His lack of generally everything had ceased to bother him as much as time wore on, but Sirius's return, his constant presence, reminded him. Even emaciated as he was, Sirius still commanded an amount of attention from his surroundings that might be normal for high-profile members of any given royal family. Or at least, Remus always felt compelled to give him this attention, simply because it was Sirius.  
  
He expected to come home after another day of being turned away from job interviews before he could get past his name and collapse into his chair. Sirius would be obnoxious but kind in his way, and there would be noises of Buckbeak thrashing around in his paddock behind the house.  
  
Instead, he opened the door and found Sirius removing several bags of money from the leg of a great horned owl.  
  
He stood, speechless, in the doorway.  
  
"Hi," Sirius said, when he noticed Remus standing there. "Harry's sent a letter. It's on the icebox."  
  
For a lack of anything else to do, and in place of voicing the rising wave of agitation, Remus picked up the letter. Even Harry's endearingly polite scrawl made him angrier.  
  
"He doesn't know where you are," he said.  
  
"No," Sirius agreed distractedly, after a moment. He was using Remus's oldest quill to pen a letter. "No one does. With the exception of Dumbledore, because that man knows everything."  
  
Remus didn't feel like continuing down that line of thought. "What's this, then," he asked quietly.  
  
"I pilfered some gold from the family vaults," he said, grinning a bit wickedly without looking away from his letter. "We shouldn't have to starve; it's ridiculous."  
  
"I don't need your charity," he said, hoping he sounded less defensive, less like the Hogwarts schoolboy who couldn't afford all of his books in third year, and more like a self-sufficient (if moderately impoverished) adult. "I don't want it, and--"  
  
Sirius looked up from his letter, looking contemptuous. Remus knew it was false immediately. "This isn't for you," he sneered. "It's for me."  
  
*  
  
Sirius made an effort for a few days to keep up appearances. When the owls came from the grocer's, he made a show about packing it all into one side of the icebox and informing Remus that he was not to touch any of it. When an order from Flourish and Blotts' came in, a package full of writing supplies and small, leather bound book labeled "Damocles," he explained to Remus that he would keep it stored under the bed, so as not to get any of it mixed up with his things.  
  
The issue came to a head when he declined to split dinner with Remus, who had gone to the trouble of making a salad large enough for two before considering how much of a arse Sirius had been. To waste it now would have hurt him physically.  
  
"Sirius.” Sirius looked up at his sharp tone, his expression too innocent - and stuffed with one of the tomatoes from his side of the icebox - and Remus sighed.  “You,” he said at last, “are an enormous tit.”  
  
“I fear I do not have the pleasure of understanding you, Remus,” said Sirius blandly, through his mouthful of tomato.  He swallowed - though it looked a bit painful; thirty-four years old and still unable to chew his food properly - and sat back on the bed, watching Remus with an expression that could be interpreted as exasperatedly fond.  
  
“I'm not terribly enamored with the idea of living off your family's money," Remus admitted.  
  
Sirius let out a tomato-flecked sigh. "Neither am I, but what choice do we have?" he said. "It's my fault you can't get a job.”  
  
“You’re the reason I’m a werewolf?” said Remus, with a wry smile.  
  
“That’s not what I meant,” Sirius muttered, picking at a hole in the quilt.  
  
Remus sighed. He picked up the other fork and tossed it to Sirius, who caught it in reflex. "Eat. Please.  And don’t do that, I’ve only got the one and I’m rubbish at mending charms.”  
  
“Hell, Moony.”  Sirius stabbed (rather angrily, Remus thought) at some lettuce, and shot him a "this isn't over yet" sort of look. But he ate the salad.  
  
"I bet you're not," he said, much later, and Remus turned the tap off to stare at him.  
  
"What?" he said, after a few moments spent trying to puzzle out what he meant.  
  
"Rubbish. At mending charms. I bet you're not."  
  
Remus snorted, and turned back to the sink. "Yes, Sirius, I'm obviously just being modest. That's definitely why my robes are all sewn up with actual thread instead of magically mended. You know how much I enjoy needlework."  
  
Sirius grunted intelligently in reply.  Another silence fell, until again, Sirius broke it.  “It’s not charity,” he said quietly.  “Fuck, Remus, look at the two of us - it's not as though opportunities for making gold are knocking down our door. We'd be fools not to use the resources at hand."  
  
"Then I'm a fool for not wanting your family's money?"  
  
"They're not my family," Sirius said, and if Remus didn't know how much he meant that, he would think Sirius petulant. "They're a bunch of bigoted shits who forgot to actually leave me out of their will. The more freely and irresponsibly I squander their gold, the better I'll feel."  
  
"Especially, I'll bet, on friends of yours they never considered proper company."  
  
"My mother will pirouette in her grave," Sirius agreed.  
  
As he always seemed to where Sirius was concerned, Remus let it go.  
  
  
("Remus," Sirius said sharply. "Have you bitten anyone? Did you bite someone and not tell me?"  
  
"No?"  
  
"Then stop acting like you're a blight on humanity and deserve to be miserable." The _You've got it hard enough without punishing yourself_ was unspoken, but Remus heard it clearly, felt it in the firmness of Sirius's bony hands as they closed around his wrists _._ )


End file.
